Best Of ManTalks: 2024
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I'm curious because I think I thought I had read somewhere that men tend to have certain. Well, let me let me go down this pathway. What should men be looking for with regards to the symptoms of trauma? Because I think for a lot of guys, trauma.

they hear things like PTSD. And because I want to help men be able to identify what that looks like, feels like, sounds like within themselves. Because I think for a lot of men, it's like, well, unless I'm experiencing intense flashbacks or, you know, crippling panic attacks, I'm probably fine. Well, yeah, again, like I was saying at the beginning, the definition or the Latin of trauma is wound or injury.

And I don't know anybody who hasn't had some wound or some injury in their lives. It may not be overwhelming, but we've all experienced, you know, things like that. And they affect us. And we can be surprised when they show up.

like all of a sudden we might be angry. So if we're in a relationship, say just a heterosexual relationship, all of a sudden we're yelling at our spouse or at our children, why didn't you put your toys away? You know, and that's the husband coming home from work. It's been a, you know, a long, long day. And again, just triggers something. That doesn't,

That doesn't come just out of the blue. Something's being triggered. Something's being remembered, not cognitively, not consciously, but in implicit memory, in procedural memory. Yeah. Okay. So...

So a man can start to identify things like reactivity, heightened reactivity, lots of anger. Yeah. Those might be signs of it. I think another one that I've seen, the reason why I asked the initial question was that I've seen people talk about how men are sometimes more likely to experience anxiety.

things like depersonalization as a result of trauma, but I'm not sure if that's statistically true or not. I'm not sure either. Let me give you an example about the anger. Oh God, 35 years ago, I was asked to work with a group of men, prisoners in San Quentin maximum security prison.

And these were a group of men who had beaten up or injured their wives or girlfriends or murdered them or killed them. And some of them were there for life sentence. And so I worked with the group. And when I was working with this one man, connecting with this one man, there was this tremendous burst of fiery rage everywhere.

And I had him feel the rage, not act on it. This is important. But feel that rage. And I had to just feel what his body wanted to do and just to hold it there, to let it be there and to breathe and breathe into it and then keep it there and keep it there and breathe and breathe and let go. And tears start forming in his eyes. And the words came from his mouth. I will never let you make me feel that small again.

So he was talking to his mother in this case. And then all the other people started crying in the group and they were hugging each other and hugging me. It's a little bit unnerving, I think, to be hugged by some people who are in there for life sentence for murder. But it was beautiful because they could really, really see where that anger came from. They were humiliated. That was their wounding was humiliation.

Again, when we flip into fear or anger, there's a reason for it. It's not just randomly happening.

Do you think that sometimes men, because I think I've seen this quite a bit where like we as men have this wonderful built-in protective strategy of our rational mind that we can hyper-intellectualize and use it as this way of like running around. Right. You ask a man what he's feeling and he'll say, he'll give you a thought, right? Yeah.

But men do tend to, not exclusively, but they do tend more, I think, more than women to rationalize, to go to their thought processes. But if you're with a person, a man, for example, who is in his head, you have to meet that person, any person, where they are, not where you want them to be or where you think they should be. And so if I'm working with a man,

and he's just talking about his thoughts, I might notice all of a sudden, along with one thought, I see a reaction in his body. Or I might say something that's interesting. When you just described to me when you were with your dog, it looked like your pulse rate went up a little bit. And then, huh, I guess so.

So you enlist curiosity. And without curiosity, there's nowhere to go. You know, when I talk about my life, because I experienced tremendous violence and trauma in my life, and one of the things that I think was really helpful in my healing

was being able to be curious about my reactions to certain things. For the guys that are out there listening, wondering how they can get a little bit more into their body, like to thaw the relationship in the body, what are some ways in which they can start to move? Take that, what's the quote? The longest journey a man will overtake is from the 18 inches, 18 inches from his head to his heart. I think that's cute.

That's good. Yeah. You know, again, I think if we're a therapist, let's just say we're therapists, if we're curious about what's going on with the person and we're curious in what's going on in us and what's going on in us in reaction to what's in response to what's going on with the person.

Then we start helping them move towards their feeling center. And it's not just the heart, but it's even our organs when we talked about and did that boo exercise. Well, a lot of that is about connecting to our visceral sense. And that's our primary area of consciousness. You know, when we're connected to our mother's womb through the placenta.

And this is a deep, deep connection, a deep, deep connection. And when we can begin to reconnect to that, many different things can start to open up in our awareness. I mean, some of it is wonderful things, but some things that come up can be unsettling, can even be frightening, at least to some degree. But again, you know, sometimes people send me books

you know, to endorse. And I was looking over one of these books and I saw this quote and I said, oh my God, I totally agree with that. And I said, I wonder where that, I wonder where it's from. I looked, it was from one of my books in Unspoken Voice. And the quote was, trauma is not so much what happened to us, but it's rather more what happens to us in the absence of an other present and empathic other.

So that there's somebody there who can witness this witness is really, really important. And I would imagine that that's one of the things that goes on in your groups when men are able to witness with others and hold this together and then to share in that witness. I think that can be a very positive experience and brings together a lot of bonding and

I was going to say just even that prison situation, you saw this incredible bonding and these were hardened criminals. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes at the men's weekend, they'll say some variation of, you know, the wounds that haven't been witnessed can't be healed. And that, you know, many of us are waiting for our wounds to be witnessed in a way that's real and authentic and raw and unfiltered and unscripted. Right.

And that once, and really felt like actually really experienced for someone to, uh,

for us to kind of lay bare in front of somebody what it was like to be in that situation. Well, I was just thinking, you know, three years ago, because I'm at the age now where I've clearly, even if I live in many more years, clearly I have less years ahead of me than from the time of conception to present time.

And so what I was doing was journaling an excavation of my life, of the things that affected me negatively, positively, of people who have been important to me in my life and how they've been important to me. And so I wrote that and it was very difficult.

Because a lot of it was very raw and vulnerable. But again, it was only for myself. But my girlfriend, I shared some of it with her. And she was moved. And she said, I assume you're going to be writing that as a book. And I said, no way. Too vulnerable is too raw. It's too much. And she said, and she was very present with me. So I could feel our connection.

And she said, well, you know, I do think that it could help people with their own healing. And so she said, well, why don't you think about it? So I thought about it and I could not come to a resolution, to a conclusion.

And sometimes, not sometimes, but often when I'm stuck and I'm not able to go forward, I'll either have a synchronicity, I'll meet somebody I haven't seen for a long time, and then something in our relationship is evoked. But also dreams. Dreams have been important in my life. And in this time of equivocation, of uncertainty, I had the following dream.

And I'm standing in front of this large, large open field. And I hold in my hands many pages from a manuscript.

and I look to the left, look to the right, look again to the left, look again to the right. And then all of a sudden, I'm unable, well, I'm unable to make the decision of what to do. All of a sudden, there's a strong breeze that comes from behind me and takes all of these pages and blows them into the wind, out into that open meadow to land where they will land. And so when I awoke...

I realized that the decision had been made for me by my unconscious mind. And so I set to write this autobiography of trauma, my healing journey or a healing journey. And it was very difficult because there were some pretty raw places, but there were also some beautiful places and some tender places.

And so what I was in a way doing was not only finding that movement in myself, but being willing, being open to sharing it with others. You know, I heard Isabel Allende and she quoted, I think it's a Jewish proverb, what is truer than truth? The answer, the story. And this book is my story.

But we all have our stories and we all have our stories to tell.

And we all can benefit by telling our stories and sharing our stories, but with the right person to not share it with anybody, because we can get injured if we, if we do that to somebody who's, you know, who's not open and not present. So, yeah, yeah. So that's, of course, that's an importance. Yeah. Well said. So did you, did you study Jung at some point along the way? Is that where? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, he, he,

He influenced me greatly, very, very greatly. He's one of the most important male figures in my life. This is a whole other story. But when I was working on my doctoral dissertation in biophysics, and this was 1971, 72, I

And I was also starting to teach the rudimentary beginnings of somatic experiencing to a group of a dozen or so Berkeley therapists. And they would come every week or every other week to my, we call it my Wildcat Canyon treehouse.

I would just hang out with them and work with them and then try to explain to them basically what I was doing and why I was doing what I was doing. So anyhow, after a long day, and they were long days, I would go to my favorite restaurant on San Pablo Avenue called The Beggar's Banquet.

and the waitresses there would always greet me by name and warmly greet me. And they would usually have me sit down at my normal table. And usually they would start, they would bring a bowl of soup, warm soup, along with crispy French bread, crispy on the outside, moist and soft on the inside. And it's kind of like

the day, the struggles for the day would recede. And I could feel the nurturance, really, their nurturance and the nurturance of being served there. So one day I'm sitting there in the usual chair, like at the small table, and off to the side I see a fleeting shadow. And I look up, and at first I don't see anything. But then after a while I see this old man

with wild, wild curly hair and wearing a ruffled sports jacket that was two or three times the size for him. And he kind of pointed to the other chair at the table. And I assumed that to be an invitation. And I did. I invited him to sit down. Well, after a short period of time, I realized this was an image. This was an image of Albert Einstein.

Now, remember, I'm also at this time doing academic work, and I know that this wasn't really Albert Einstein. And it's something that's called active imagination, which was something that Jung coined the term. So it's something where we...

It's like a bridge between conscious and unconscious processes. And active imagination, I did a little reading about that. And what I came up with is that active imagination does not occur in adults. It only occurs in children. And I remember thinking, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We adults needed more children.

than the children do, and we all need it, and it's all a beautiful thing. Again, it's a way of connecting unconscious and conscious processes. Well, anyhow, for a period of over a year, I would ask questions to this figure, to this imaginary figure, Albert Einstein, and he would ask me questions about my questions.

This is the method that Socrates used, the Socratic dialogue. Somebody would ask him a question and then he asked them a question about their question. Well, that's what went on between me and the professor for that following year.

And at the very end, he really helped me understand how generational trauma, generational wounds that didn't happen necessarily to us in our lifetime, but to our parents' lives, grandparents', great-great-grandparents', and ancestors', and so forth. And so we had this really incredible, engaging conversations. Again, me asking questions, he asking questions about my questions.

Well, again, the logical part of me, the mental part of me realized that this was not a real occurrence, but it certainly seemed real. And it had a deep meaning to me. Well, about 35 years ago, and I just, you know, after a while, you know, on time to time, I would kind of evoke his presence if I had a question to ask. And it was a special kind of relationship.

So about 30, 35 years ago, I was visiting my parents in New York, in the Bronx. And I had gone downstairs downtown to go to museums. And at the end of the day, I was going up, took the D train up to 205th Street, walked up the hill, opened the door to my parents' apartment, and the two of them were sitting in a sofa. But above the sofa...

There was a bookshelf, and I noticed one of the bookshelves was Einstein's theory of relativity. So that prompted me to tell my parents, especially my mother, what had happened to me. And my mother stood up straight, and she said, I said, yeah, this was my imagination. And she said, no, Peter, it wasn't your imagination. That really happened.

And I thought, what? What is she saying? How does she know that? It doesn't make any sense at all. Because I know it was active imagination. It wasn't real. So my mother went on to say, you know, when I was eight months in utero when she was pregnant, eight months with me, she and my father were taking a canoe ride in a lake in New Jersey.

And a strong wind came and tipped the canoe over. And they were unable to right the canoe. And they certainly would have perished. They certainly would have drowned. And I wouldn't be talking to you because I wouldn't be. I wouldn't have survived. So just then, in that moment of life threat, a small sailboat came along. And there was an old man and young woman in that boat.

And they pulled my parents to safety, gave them towels to dry themselves off, and then introduced themselves to my parents. They introduced themselves as Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter. And my mother realized, and she could be incredibly intuitive, and I think that's one of the gifts I've gotten from her. Gotten a lot of difficult stuff, but that was one of the really positive experiences for

And my mother realized that since Albert Einstein had saved my life, that we would forever be bonded, bonded together.

And her sharing of that was a really powerful, beautiful experience. And again, how she knew that and how she could just bring that memory up and talk about it really said something about her intuitive capacity. I remember saying to a group of men, we had 30 men at a men's weekend.

And I said, for the next few years, the men who are able to tolerate the most unknown will probably fare the best during this time. And I've really felt that in my bones and a kind of knowing of like, things are going to be okay in the long run, whatever okay means. I don't know what that's going to look like. But...

It's hard, I find, because maybe I'll just speak personally. I find myself wanting to engage. I have a deep urge sometimes to engage with the people who have that framework that everything's coming to an end, that this sort of like death and destruction and finiteness. And I understand it to a degree in the sense that we all have our own relationship with death and understanding with it and journey of death.

growing closer to it, but I find myself wanting to be wanting to like shake people sometimes and be like, no. And maybe that's just the youthful optimist in me. Um, but I appreciate the frame that you laid out. Is there anything you want to just add in there? It seemed like you had something to say. Yeah. Cause it's not based on optimism. I'm okay. Optimism, pessimism. To me, those are not big things. You can put each one on like a jacket.

is really based on mythology of really old, meaningful stories. Like in the modern world, myth means something false. In the ancient world, myth meant emergent truth. And so the truths that get forgotten don't disappear, they're in the stories. Myths are the universal truths being shown. And we started out talking about dissent

And one of the best known myths to this day in the modern Western world is the myth of Icarus, who rises and flies too close to the sun with wings that are held on by wax. And so inevitably the wax melts and the wings fall and he plunges it to his first big descent. And so that's used to understand what happens to musicians.

that become celebrities too fast. What happens to politicians that maybe had a pretty good idea, but now they get so much power. Now they're out of control and starlets who, and everybody who gets addicted and all that kind of stuff is all in that story. And so that's what myths are about. They give a way, a frame and a dynamic for understanding, oh, this is part of the world. And so therefore I'm experiencing it. Now my personal story is now in this much bigger story. And

And the biggest story that I've been able to find is that the world ends only to begin again, just the way a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But if you like the story, you start at the beginning again. And so, and nature, see, cultures used to read the text of nature. That's one of the ideas. Nature is a living text.

And so you look at a forest and the forest is this magnificent production that then in a sense collapses. And from its collapsed matter comes the new forest. And so that's the text. And traditional people used to read that text and say, oh, we're living in that cosmos.

Because that's what's happening to the stars also. And so I'm working a lot lately on transformation, which literally means to move from one form to another. And once we get the idea we're in the middle of a transformation of life on Earth, suddenly it's not nihilism.

It's just, it's really possibilities become, and it doesn't mean there isn't suffering. We know how much people are suffering in the world. War has come back in this World War II version and worse. Liberties and freedoms are at risk all around the world. So we know that there's a descent of that kind going on. But the bigger understanding of mythology and cosmology is that those things have happened before and the world has renewed itself from its own ashes.

and from its own hidden roots. And then the person does the same thing. So we're back to the idea of descent. The person does the same thing. And a man isn't someone who has never fallen. It's someone that has fallen deep enough that they found themselves.

The elder wasn't someone who hadn't slipped and made mistakes and fallen down. The only kind of elders you want is people who have fallen hard and found a way back. So when you fall, they help you and they actually have compassion for your falling because they found a compassionate sense of self when they fell.

And so when you have modern leaders say, I'm the only one who can fix it or say that we have to man up, I don't know. I think we're better off if we man down, you know, and find out what's down there, just the way the forest has its radical roots anchored deep in the earth. Resiliency means to spring back up, but you spring back up from a radical resilient root, the root to the deep self.

And it goes back to the idea of people don't know they are a unique being, a unique soul inside themselves. They can fall for any story and usually fall for worrying too much or worrying in the wrong direction. And so I think we're in the middle of a collective rite of passage. That's why I use that terminology a lot. It's not just to go back and try to be like some traditional person. It's to understand what we're actually going through.

That does seem to be part of the challenge is that there are calls to return to something in the past that's unreturnable to. And I liked Terrence McKenna said that we, what we're in need of is an archaic revival. You know, I liked the way that he framed that in some ways. Right. And I've always viewed myths as a kind of, um,

a story version of a zip file, you know, like that has like all these little zip files in it that have these massive truths embedded into it that you can click on and it expands and sort of emerges within your consciousness, but it holds much larger truths than we can sort of write out in a sentence. And so,

It's interesting. When I was preparing for this interview, I was torn because on the one hand, I wanted to talk about some of these larger pieces like the rule of descent. But on the other hand, I wanted to talk about just some of the symbols and myths that actually are important for masculine development. So maybe we'll have to do a round two at some point where we get into that. Because I'm going to go in the other direction, which is

I'm curious about, as something like AI comes online, what role do you think that myth can or might play within a world where we have a PhD chatbot in our pocket and we have this kind of intelligence that matches or surpasses ours from a computational standpoint?

How do we ensure that something like AI isn't missing out on the importance of myth in terms of how it's influenced human development from a psychological, emotional standpoint? Where do you see those two things coming together or maybe not at all? Well, I think AI is another manifestation of the distance from the self.

the distance from deep inner knowledge. And it announces itself very clearly. It's artificial intelligence. So, you know, if you're going to be serious about things, you want actual intelligence, you want natural intelligence, you want emotional intelligence, and you want mythological intelligence. And so in myth, the world is often broken into three levels. Myths often have threes, beginning, middle, end.

And so the first level is the literal level of life, linear time, time ticking away on a linear basis. The end is coming. That's linear thought, literal thought. What you see is completely real or, you know, that kind of thing. And that's a limited world. And I think that's the AI world. That's what they're doing. They're taking data and information and using it as a form of intelligence. And that's fine.

I mean, it's not fine, but it's not definitive. But what AI can't do, even though it's going to pretend to do, is be psychologically aware. It can't do it because the psyche, psychological means there's two levels. You've moved to a deeper level. You have the outer world and the inner experience. You have the ego and the self. Everything doubles in the psychological world. You have depressive and obsessive.

What's the opposite of the depressive? I forgot the word right now. Like elative. Elation and depression. You have both of them. So the psychological world is a doubling.

And it means that there's meaning in my life, but there's meaning in yours. And it means that there's things that I can receive that I couldn't create on my... It gets to be complex and interrelated. And AI is not going to do that. It's going to have the appearance of connection, just as it will have the appearance of intelligence. And then the third level down is the mythological level. Myth comes in threes. And now you get the connection to another world.

And maybe this is my argument against AI, which I haven't bothered to work on yet, but in the moment it occurs to me. AI is about being in this world. And humans have always lived in two worlds. And the world different from this world, the Irish called it the other world. And they said, we're always one step from the other world. You step back.

From contentment towards grief, you're in the other world. You step towards isolation, towards love, you're in the other world. And so this other world is the antidote to the problems in this world. The committee's trying to use the same thought patterns that got us into trouble to get us out of trouble are not effective. You have to go to the other world to get medicine, the medicine of deep intelligence, the medicine of wisdom versus intelligence.

the medicine of love and care and all those things. And so I think we're going to have to find the medicines that will turn out to be the antidote to the appearance of intelligence and the appearance, you know, community doesn't mean people living near each other. And it doesn't mean people horizontally connected on the World Wide Web.

That horizontal connection to me is an indication of the collapse of vertical imagination. We are in a flat world now, and we relate that way. But the word community comes from the Latin communitas, and it means something happens that is so deep that it pulls everyone together regardless of what their opinions are. And that's the community we're looking for. That's the medicine is in the community of the soul.

and the AI doesn't have a function in the community of the soul. And so it's going to happen. All the big corporations have invested millions, no, billions, if not trillions in it. It's going to happen. But it announces itself very clearly, artificial intelligence. Where it bothers me is if I'm writing on a computer,

which I do, and I'm moving fast. But now, if I don't turn it off, I start to make a phrase. Well, it's not even me making it. It's occurring to me. It's coming from the muses, and it's an interesting phrase, whatever it is. And before I can finish it, the words are appearing like they're trying to finish it for me. That's what's wrong, that it interrupts people's natural imagination, and it replaces it with superficial intelligence, even if it's clever.

It's a substitute for being fully alive, for being connected to one's own imagination and to be living in a meaningful way. So we'll get past it. I think sometimes women underestimate how much men want peace relationally.

because they feel at war with themselves. They feel at war sometimes with the world or in their job, or maybe they are in a career that is more competition-oriented or war-oriented. And so men are often seeking peace in their relationship, but if their system has been wired differently,

then they don't know how to create that. And I hear that all the time with guys of like, I just want peace in my relationship. And it's like, well, then why do you keep choosing partners that are going to battle with you? Or how come you continue to show up in a way in your relationship where you're provoking, you know, fights? And it's always that, you know, that conditioning of the nervous system underneath. So...

I want to touch on a couple things and I want to move towards how do we develop a really secure attachment where that vibrancy of intimacy, of attraction is still there. Because I think sometimes when guys hear this kind of stuff, it's like, okay, but I don't want the boring relationship. I don't want just like ease and nothing. Like I want heat. I want passion. I still want some fire.

But I want to just contextualize a couple of things. So let's talk about avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, because everybody knows the terminology. How would you describe what's happening in somebody's body and nervous system who has a more anxious attached style? The whole vehicle responsible for how we attach, so connect to other people, is our autonomic nervous system. And I say this a lot, you cannot learn your way into...

secure attachment. So you could read the book Attach. You could read Jod Bowlby's work. He's awesome, of course, who's the scientist behind attachment theory. But that learning won't change your attachment because it's all happening in your body and your nervous system is the vehicle that's making it all happen. So if you had an anxious attachment, that's the result of having caregivers who are on again and off again in their ability to attach, connect with you. They weren't always available. So as a result of that and

and a few other things, we develop this anxious attachment where my system essentially does not feel safe by myself. I need another to feel safe and regulated. So I'm going to be overly focused on whether this isn't friendship or romantic partnership on the other person. I'm going to sacrifice myself. I'm going to, let's say we're in a fight and we have a disconnection. I'm going to do whatever I can to get the connection back.

A way that I like to describe attachment is imagining that if you're in a relationship with someone, it's like there's a rope between the two of you. Think of it like a really big rope, like maybe a rope on a cruise ship. Every moment of connection you've had is like a strand on the rope that just got laid. So, you know, if I'm with someone for a while, it could be a very big rope. When we're in connection, it's like we're both holding the rope. But when we have a rupture or disconnection, an argument, let's say,

It's as if some of the strands of the rope get dropped. So it might be like, you know, 20 strands. If it's a big argument, maybe 100, but I've got 10,000. But if we have an anxious attachment, it feels like the whole rope has been dropped. So it feels like the whole relationship could be over for my system in that moment. And then I go into a survival response and my nervous system uses our sympathetic nervous system, which is often referred to as fight or flight,

because that's the state of mobilizing and doing. So this is where anxiety, worry, frustration, fear, terror, rage, rafing heart. I'm laser focused on this one thing. I can't think about anything else. And I just have to get the connection back. And what I'm going to do is I need you to pick up the rope. So I'm going to do anything I can to get you to pick up the rope. I'm going to say we have to talk about this now. If we don't talk about this now, things aren't going to be OK. I'll even say I apologize, even though maybe I shouldn't actually be apologizing. But I am because I just want you to pick up the rope. I will do whatever

Whatever it takes, I will sacrifice myself. I will sacrifice maybe even my career, anything to stay in connection with you because this is a survival response based on my childhood.

So that's what it's like to have an anxious attachment. And it's, of course, very exhausting. You might feel like you're on eggshells all the time. And again, I will do anything to make sure that we're in connection because if we're in connection, then I feel safe. Now, if you have an avoidant attachment, maybe did you want to say something, expand on that before I go to the avoidant? I was just going to say, I think the way that I've tried to distill it down is like, I need you in order for me to feel okay.

That's right. I need to be in touch with you. I need to be in relationship with you. I need you to be around and I need to know that you're okay in order for me to be okay. So I just wanted to add that caveat because I found that personally to be helpful. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And that's a really exhausting thing, right? And I just want to name that there's a negative connotation with people who are anxiously tapped, which is that you're needy. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You're not needy. Your nervous system doesn't know how to self-regulate fully. Yep.

That's what it is. Yet, which we can learn. Now, if you're avoidantly attached, I think of this like being like an island off to yourself. And this is the result of having caregivers who were either neglectful or dangerous. So when I needed to self-regulate, I couldn't self-regulate. I needed support to regulate my nervous system. They either were dangerous or not there. And so what my nervous system does is, well, I'm in trouble because the option is to be in a perpetual state of dysregulation or

we can resource something called our dorsal vagal complex. This is our oldest state of dysregulation in our nervous system. It's 500 million years old. And this state helps us to disconnect from our feelings, our truth, our bodies altogether. This is where dissociation lives, so I can fully disconnect. And my nervous system learns that in order to survive, I have to go it alone.

So I'm disconnecting from my embodied experience, my feelings, certainly my ability to connect with others. And I learned to go it along. Now, people who are avoidantly attached, the negative connotation is that you don't care. That couldn't be further from the truth. People who are avoidant deeply care, but it's so overwhelming to let people close

because I never experienced that in the past or when I did, it was dangerous. So for us in relationship, when I'm with someone else and there's a very common combination of someone being anxiously attacked, someone being avoidant,

But I deeply want connection and closeness. But as people come close to me and maybe you're dating someone and they like have the talk with you and they want to, you know, be exclusive or maybe they want to move in or, you know, talk about these things. My nervous system is saying, I don't know that or that was dangerous in the past. And there's a reflexive impulse to try to get away.

And so I call this like going to our island. It can be for us, it's very challenging to communicate our needs, communicate our truth. Here's a simple example. If someone says to you, like your partner's like, tell me about your day. You probably say something like, it's fine. How's your day? And the reason being is because oftentimes I was very avoidant and also had lots of

really I was disorganized. But I would think to myself, why am I going to tell you about my day? I already know about it. What is the benefit to telling you about my day? That's a very avoidant person thing to say because I didn't know that you could actually get something from that because I was so used to going it alone. So it's a real difficulty asking for help, leaning on someone else, letting someone close to you. And when a disconnection occurs for avoidant person, it's like

we drop the rope and need to leave. It's a reflex. Like I have to get out. I can't talk about this. I have to get out of here. It's overwhelming for me. And not because I don't care, but because my nervous system doesn't have the capacity to be in this with the other person. So they're really opposing experiences to be anxiously attached or avoidantly attached.

And then those parts of us seek out oftentimes the confirming experience of the energetic polarity, right? Like the anxious person. It's so funny how anxious people and avoidant people find themselves together so much, because it's usually reconfirming the experience that they had growing up in some capacity. Like, oh, why do you need me all the time?

That's right. Are you trying to talk to me all the time? Get away from me. Give me some space from the guy that grew up as a boy with a mom who was overbearing and constantly checking in on him and a smother mother. And so, yeah, it's so interesting. Okay. So just maybe we're not going to solve everyone's attachment stuff here on this call, but I think it would be helpful to give some direction in terms of

If you're anxious, where do you go? What do you actually start with? And any insight that you can give to the anxious partner, whether they're secure or not, because I think that's a question that I get a lot.

I think of relational dynamics and coming into a relationship. What we're looking for is that, or actually I'll first say this, this is the place or the playground where your younger parts show up the most, more than anywhere else. And that is because of the threat detector. So the threat detector, again, looks to the database and it says, what intel do we have on love and connection? It's always going to look to your childhood. And so that means, just want to explain this quickly. If I'm

I'm with my partner. I'm telling him something really important. And he looks at his phone. He looks away. My threat detector says, what does this remind me of? Quickly looks at the database. Reminds me of when I was in middle school and I had to do everything alone and my father was never around. And in that moment, it is literally like we travel time. So my nervous system is no longer seeing my loving partner who did something shitty. But you know what? He's 99% of the time like I'm making this up. Obviously, it's not for my life, but

99% of the time, this amazing person, but he's doing this thing. But my system thinks, no, this is like when I was 10 or 11. And so it's literally like I am no longer this woman that I am. I am a 10-year-old. Literally, that is what's happening physiologically speaking in your nervous system. And now you're responding the same way you did when you were 10. And guess what's going to happen for him? He's going to see that his hypercritical mother or father, and he's

he's going to say, well, this reminds me of when I was eight years old and my mother was so hypercritical of me. And now he's not a grown man. He's eight years old. So now we have a 10-year-old and an eight-year-old literally have swords out, fighting each other, trying to protect themselves the way they did in their childhood. I just want to name, you talked earlier about, well, we really want to have polarity and feel this

this like excitement and our sexuality is fully alive and I want to feel this like fiery thing in a relationship. Well, you can only feel that if adult you, both parties, the adult parts of ourselves are running the show. Then that will always be there for us, available for us to develop too. But

But if we have younger parts running the show, that's not going to be possible. Because you know what those younger parts are looking for? It's almost like we're all, I think of it like we're all orphans. Even if you have loving parents, there's things they couldn't do. So we have these like orphan part of ourselves that are still looking to get the thing they never got. So those parts are looking more for a parent in our partner than they are looking for a

a lover because, and of course our young carts wouldn't be looking for a lover anyway. They'd be looking for safety. So if we have young carts running the show in our relational dynamics, then what's going to happen is we aren't going to feel that kind of spark and that aliveness that we really want. And so the work is we have to become the primary parent to our younger parts that live inside of us. And then I think of it like we're the primary parent and our partner is the secondary parent because we want their help.

But we want to be the one that's taking care of those young parts. So if you're anxiously attached, your young parts are going to be relaxively doing everything they can to get your partner close to you and to keep them close to you, which, of course, we know will suffocate a relationship long term if we do that because it's survival energy. So our work is to do a couple of things. Number one, we have to build our capacity for self-regulation, meaning

meaning we have to teach ourselves how to actually regulate our nervous systems. That's the work that I, a big part of the work that I do with individuals. And this is literally, it's literally like going to the gym. Our nervous systems are malleable and shapeable. That's what neuroscience shows us. So we can actually regulate

shape our nervous systems with enough consistent neuro exercises. And think of that like a rep at the gym. So we want to start teaching ourselves that I can do things on my own, whether that's controlled breathing, dancing, going for a walk, being in nature, listening to music, doing yoga, creating art, anything that's supporting. There's a lot of therapeutic tools, of course, too, but anything that supports you to feel more present, hearing good. And we

And we need to exercise that on our own. I can do things that support my nervous system to regulate. That's really the work of someone who's anxiously attached. And then creating what I call internal co-regulation, meaning getting a sense on who is this part of me that's present in my body when this fight happened, let's say. Do I feel like adult me right now? Do I feel capable, able, present here? Or do I feel like something else, maybe out of control, scared, small, etc.?

If you do not feel like adult you, that means that a young card is present. And your work in that moment is to pause this conversation and turn towards self-regulation. You can also turn towards co-regulation with another person. We want to first do self-regulation, but then it might be like, you know what? I'm going to sit with my dog for a minute. I'm going

I'm going to watch this video of someone who's registered as safe for me. I listen to this podcast. All of those things help bring regulation in my nervous system. And then when I'm more regulated, then we come back into connection with our partner and repair from adult us. But not having those young parts be at a constant war. Now, if someone is avoidantly attached, your impulse is to run away. And our system is really good at self-regulating.

and not so good at co-regulating. So our work is to lean into connection with others. And by the way, the hardest connection is going to be with the people closest to you. Avoidant people, they're pretty great at connecting with strangers because there's not intimacy and vulnerability involved in that. When it comes to the people you're closest with, that's going to feel the most dangerous. So we want to see like, can I start connecting with even like strangers on a walk? Can I connect a little more deeply with a friend? Can I

share a little bit more with my partner, just a little bit more tolerable steps towards deeper connection is what we're going to look for. And then when it comes to an actual rupture or an argument, your reflex is going to be to leave. Now, we don't want to inhibit that. We want to let ourselves take space. But the job of someone who's avoidant is to say, I'm noticing this is happening right now and I need to take some space to regulate and I'll be back in 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Can we try to reconnect? It's

It's the job of the avoidant person, though, to come back. It's not the job of the anxious person to then go chase them. And when we can both do that, the anxious person can tolerate taking space and learning to self-regulate. The avoidant person can tolerate coming back into connection and closeness. We actually help each other heal the past and the present. And I think that's one of the most beautiful things that relationships give us.

I think what's interesting about what you're saying, these sort of like holes in maturation, I want to frame it a couple of different ways. And please tell me if there's anything that doesn't resonate. But I also think that a hole in the maturation could be an interruption to our development psychologically. And I think what you're saying is that when we get into conflict in our relationship or there's like this big

seemingly unresolvable thing that's happening in the relationship, where you feel lost in your life and you're not really too sure why, or you can't seem to find your purpose and it feels like there's something just fundamentally blocking you, you know, et cetera, we just go down the list. That's likely a sign that there has been something that has disrupted your development at somewhere along the way. And the work that I think you're talking about that you and I do, which is similar in a lot of ways,

is to go back and find those interruptions and then to help a man, again, not just to conceptualize it or think about it, but to actually feel into it and fill in that experience that he never got.

Is that an accurate way of putting it? Exactly. I mean, never got, yeah, it needs to complete. You know, I was friends with and studied with Peter Levine back in the early 80s and, you know, and his whole model of trauma and that freeze response, because when we can't fight, we can't run, you know, our biology just goes to freeze, which is disassociation, which is essentially what a hole is. We just checked out in that period of maturation.

And inevitably, particularly in relationships, as you said, we sort of fall into these holes. But we need to complete it. So there's a physiological completion. There's a relational completion. There's an emotional completion. And then the last thing that happens is sort of the intellectual completion.

And we need opportunities. We can't just understand it. We have to experience it. Yeah, I think I want to give a couple examples on this just so that the listener can like really have a tangible sense of what we're talking about. So I'll use myself as an example. I didn't get a healthy discipline in a way that taught me how to have in

impulse control as a child. I just did not receive that. What I received was shaming and physical abuse and verbal abuse. And so anytime that I was out of control or making the wrong decision, it would result in some form of punishment. And because of that, the hole that I experienced in my maturation or in my development was nobody really taught me how to have impulse control.

No one stayed with me and sat me down and actually helped me to regulate the energy in my body that was coming up. And so what ended up happening was I became a young man who had no impulse control. And so as soon as my brain would say, go watch porn or drink that or smoke that or text her or whatever it was, there was a very weak system of I shouldn't do that or I'm not going to do that. I'm going to say no to that.

And it was something that I remember when I first started working with one of my first mentors. This is over a decade ago. That's one of the first things that we talked about. And he was this little French Canadian guy named Bernard, and he was in his 70s. He bred Rottweilers, which gives you a little bit of an insight into the type of man that he was. He just had this

He wasn't more than like five foot seven, five foot eight, but he was fierce. Like there was something about him. Like I'm at the time I was like six one and like 230 pounds.

And there was something about him that just made me almost like tremble a little bit internally because he felt so congruent and so sure of himself. But I remember we worked on impulse control relentlessly and it really shifted and changed my life. And so I think it's these types of things that just as sort of an example, being able to say no to yourself, being able to say no to that impulse of opening the web browser to watch the porn or whatever.

Anything else that you would add into that as an example, just so the listener can sort of, I think they probably got it, but anything else you want to add in? I think it goes to the co-regulation. You said, you know, I had more of the control than you did, but I didn't have the connection. And so what was missing was the emotional connection. And so it was subtle. And this is what I see a lot of guys, because you'll talk to a guy and go, yeah, I had good parents and I thought I had good parents, but, you know, because it's the water I was swimming, I didn't know what was missing.

But there was no emotional. And I didn't see or feel my parents ever getting upset in any way, positive, negative. So I learned to have no emotional affect, which I think was a setup in part to my whole Asperger's thing. But regardless of that, I didn't have any guardrails on emotions because they didn't exist.

And so I didn't have that co-regulation there. And I think in both of our cases, particularly for a young man, there's an urge. And so we don't want to thwart the urge. We just want to contain it. And so it's that balance of, so you have this impulse, but what's driving the impulse?

And what's deeper than that impulse? So we think the impulse is, you know, the masturbation, the porn, the this and the that. Yeah, that's an affect. But in its essence, it's pure and it's wholesome and it's innocent.

And when someone can just be with you and connect to that part, all the rest of it down regulates. The rest of it is the affect. It's like with me and my ADHD, you know, my hyperness. That was an affect for my essence, just wanting someone to resonate with it or co-regulate with it and go, hey, Owen, it's okay. I'm here with you.

And once we really get that, and I'm sure you see it in your work and we see it in our work, the guy just relaxes. Because that purity is finally seen and accepted. And we didn't have that. Yeah. Yeah, and it's interesting because I see it in my son. You know, he's like, he just turned three in March.

So he's in this phase of really rambunctious, big energy, you know, constantly in the morning, at night, after work, just like wrestle data, wrestle data, wrestle data. It's just all he wants to do is be physically active.

And, you know, he's in that phase as well where the tantrums are there, right? When he's told no or it's time to transition from something that he really wants to be doing, then it's like big energy. And so I've found myself having to really like sit with him, have good guardrails with it, not become so disrupted by it and help him to learn, one, that big energy is okay.

Because I think for a lot of young boys, what they get is do not let that big energy out. So they're shamed around that big energy, whether it's anger or frustration or sadness or whatever it is.

And then two, sitting with him to help him regulate. And sometimes it's so funny because sometimes he'll do breath work with me in the morning. And so when he starts to throw a tantrum, sometimes I'll say, okay, inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. And at first he's like, no, no data. He'll get so pissed off, like, screw you. Stop trying to co-regulate with me.

But after a while, after time, he'll usually calm down quite a bit. And so it's just interesting to see it in real time. But I think that

I think that it's interesting because one of the core things within our modern culture about masculinity is this notion that you should be able to do it all by yourself, whatever it is, whatever challenge you're facing, you should be able to figure it out, whatever problem you're dealing with, you should be able to deal with it on your own. And I think that it's really disconnected from

not just emotionally, but I think it's disconnected relationally, a lot of men from other men and from the women in their lives. So I just love for you to speak to that and the value of being able to bring some of our shit, for lack of a better term, the clinical term, to the people in our lives. I think you're right on with that. You know, you sort of touched on it before I was going to come back to it, which is, yeah, we're told that we need to be self-reliant. And certainly we need to be in some way. But

It's overemphasized. And I was like, or I tried to be a master of self-reliance. And I studied with a guy named Ron Kurtz, which comes out of the Reich tradition, which, you know, William Reich, you know, was along with Freud, along with Jung, a contemporary of Freud. And, you know, he went down the body track.

And so what these guys figured out was in our maturation, from really conception all the way to puberty, when we have trauma, we'll get stuck in a particular place where that's a big hole. And our body will form around that. Our body shape and quality and certainly structure or posture will form around that. And I was a classic self-reliant type.

My shoulders were back, I tried to be tough and Ron used to call that the gunslinger. The cowboy out in the rain on the lone range,

alone going, I don't need anyone. I can do it all on my own. I'm not weak. I can survive on my own. And that was sort of my mantra. I remember arguing that in a college class. But doing all this work, I realized that was a denial of what they might call my orality or my need, my need for connection. I think as a society, particularly for men, we've been trained to be self-reliant.

And we think it that strong, and it's not because, you know, you know, and I know from our own work and working with all these men is that they really become stronger when they have this sense of, you know, what you were calling it mature masculine, but they also have this connection with others.

And the other starts to feel this trust in you when you have this, because you're not out there trying to prove anything. You're just strong. And the strong, I think ultimately comes down to how present can you be in that moment? And my work for all these years is,

to increase my ability to be present under more and more circumstances. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I got a text message from one of my close friends this morning, and he was sharing with me a really hard conversation that he had with his partner yesterday. And, you know, a decade ago, I never got any of those text messages. I never sent any of those text messages. That was not a part of any relationship that I had with the men in my life, period. You know, it was like,

If something was wrong in my relationship, I didn't talk about it. You know, I just stuffed it down and tried to figure out a way to deal with it. And so, yeah, I do think that a huge part of self-leadership, of course, is developing the competency in order to move your life in the direction that you want to go. But I think that in tandem with that, we have to also develop relationships that are going to support us and that we, you know, that we want to invest in them. And

And it's like the cliche saying, right? Iron sharpens iron. We've all heard it. We all know that there's some intrinsic value in that statement. But then to actually enact that is something completely different, right? To text a friend and saying, hey,

I have this problem in my work and I really don't know what to do. Or I have this financial situation happening. I'm not too sure how to handle it. Or there's this big conflict that I just had with my wife or my partner and I'm devastated and I don't need anything but other than to just tell you what just happened. And I think that it's those simple things that most men are lacking in their male friendships.

And what would you say gets in the way? Is it simply just a narrative that we as men need to overcome in order to develop deeper relationships with other men or there are some other ingredients that we need? I think there's a societal pressure, which you just sort of mentioned, there's the external, which is huge. And we're so accustomed to it that we don't realize how impactful it is.

And there's, until recently, really been no conversation around that. But at least equally important is the physiological, emotional component. Because, you know, I can't do what we're talking about if I'm not somewhat connected to my own experience.

And to be connected to my own experience is, at least initially, can be scary, can be vulnerable. Like you or me to call a friend, first we need to feel that I'm scared or I'm sad or whatever that is. And we don't have a model. We don't have teaching around that. So there's this whole component of being aware of

at least somewhat aware of our own real experience, not our mental experience, again, not the analysis, because that's where we usually go, but the somatic and emotional vulnerability of, oh shit, you know, I had this fight with my partner. I'm my loser. I'm really scared. I fucked up. What do I do about this? And inevitably it gets back to what we were saying before, Connor, is that we, um,

fell into one of the holes. And in that hole, there's this chronic sort of disconnection and we're lost. And we need someone to sort of, not necessarily take us out of the hole, but maybe take us a little deeper into it and us to feel what we really can't feel. Because once we start to feel it,

And our body and our emotions can start releasing it or cycling it. And then we can get ourselves out, you know, maybe with others. But until we connect to what we were disconnected from, we're just going in circles. Don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it or could use it. Until next week, Conor Beaton signing off.

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